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We’re delighted to be recognized by the London Stock Exchange for the second year running as one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic SMEs in the UK. Over the course of the last year we’ve pushed ourselves to make sure we continue to give our customers with the tools they need to be the best marketers they can. The result was our acquisition of Comapi last November, and the launch of new omnichannel features to enhance our platform.

In the report SMEs are said to “have the potential to power our economy into the future” and that’s why we’re incredibly proud of the services we provide small and medium sized businesses like us around the world. From SMS and product recommendations to automated re-targeting through Google AdWords and Facebook Audience nodes, we’re enabling brands to engage more effectively with their audiences across multiple channels and all from one place.

To find out more about our omnichannel features talk to your account manager or request a demo today.

The full report can be found on the LSE Group website where you can download your own copy and find a searchable database of all the companies listed in the publication.

Last November dotdigital Group acquired Comapi as a strategic move to bring omnichannel messaging to the dotmailer platform. In the past 100 days since the acquisition, you will have seen the start of this omnichannel innvoation with new features being added to our marketing automation platform. For those of you attending our dotmailer summit on April 19, we will be revealing a lot more!

So, that’s a big tick in the marketing automation box. However, we also know that many of our customers have a requirement to use these messaging channels in different ways, outside of marketing.

As part of the dotdigital Group, Comapi is breaking new ground, helping businesses and tech platforms harness the power of messaging on channels such as Facebook Messenger, SMS, Web Chat, Push and Social. This ensures brands maximize their engagement with customers.

Hooking up these channels into your own systems and utilizing a powerful Application Programing Interface (API) allows you to supercharge your customer engagement; for instance, you can drive two-way conversational communications and real-time customer messages such as alerts, appointment reminders, payment confirmations, click-and-collect notifications and one-time passcodes for verification.

We understand that this may not always form part of the marketer’s role, per se. All we ask is that you share this news internally with your teams who may be responsible, and help our Comapi team connect with them to learn how the dotdigital group is changing the messaging landscape.

Or if this is your remit, reach out to them using the details below and see how they can help you deliver API and conversational messaging to support your customer engagement strategy.

We will be giving away one of our highly prized ‘Winston’ toys to the first 100 introductions – so get in early

With over 16 years of experience and knowledge, Comapi already powers the messaging experience of many brands, so you’re in safe hands.

This is an exciting time for the dotdigital group as we expand our technology to cover both marketing and business communications, help our customers grow and win big. If you’d like to find out more, follow this link and get in touch with the Comapi team; we’d love to see how we can help.

We’re thrilled to be included in the London Stock Exchange Group’s report of Britain’s 1000 inspiring companies. The fourth edition of this report is a celebration of the UK’s fastest-growing and most dynamic small and medium sized businesses across the UK.

Companies had to meet certain criteria: be UK-registered and active; have revenues between £6 million and £250 million – based on latest Companies House filings – and have a minimum of three years in operation.

The LSE Group describes those 1000 business’ identified as having a unique capacity to innovate and create new jobs, in turn spreading the growth of the UK economy.

This statement rings true as we recently co-lead the creation of the Croydon Good Employer charter, pledging our own support to continued economic investment in the local area; Croydon has a special place in our heart – our technology office has been based there since 2002!

Currently, dotmailer employs 240 people worldwide, with over 200 of those working in the UK.

We’re delighted to have made an appearance in the Financial Times’ inaugural report of Europe’s 1,000 fastest-growing companies.

More than 50,000 organizations were evaluated, in conjunction with Statista, with those featured in the top 1,000 achieving the highest growth in revenue between 2012 and 2015. The dotdigital Group came in at 917, among the likes of UKFAST, Skyscanner and Just Eat.

As the FT puts it, innovative and fast-growing companies play a significant role in the European economy in the 21st century, generating jobs and sustaining competitiveness. This statement rings true as we expand our business and customer base in areas such as the Nordics, Benelux and beyond.

Over the last 12 months we’ve also had a presence at a number of events in countries including Holland and Hungary, with more planned over the coming months.

dotmailer, part of the dotdigital group, now employs 211 people in Europe, with 197 in the UK and 14 based in Belarus.

I joined as a graduate almost 8 years ago in the New Business sales team. I moved into Account Management and have progressed through the ranks in the Account Management function to now head up the Key Accounts team. I had learned about email marketing at university and marketing in general was what I enjoyed most from my degree. dotmailer offered me the opportunity to not only do what I was good at, but also support clients from the strategic side. I knew right from the first interviews that I wanted to work at such an exciting and growing company.

Tell us a bit about your role

My role as the Group Account Director is to lead the Key Account team and has three main elements. One: I support and line manage the Key Account Directors, whose primary responsibilities are to develop our clients email programs to ensure they meet their objectives. The goal of the team overall is to provide outstanding service to our clients and to continually push their email marketing. Two: I work top-level with our clients from a strategic point of view. I challenge their status quo to make sure they don’t become stale with their email marketing. Three: I work closely with the other senior managers to refine the internal processes so that our key account clients have a seamless journey through the various teams at dotmailer. This ensures that we deliver the highest possible service to the client and that they continue to use the platform.

Lili, the basketball lover

What accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I’m most proud of the fact that I began at dotmailer 8 years ago as a graduate and the company has rewarded my hard work and provided me with additional responsibilities and growth opportunities. I feel very fortunate to work for that kind of a company, and that my colleagues across the business look to me for guidance and advice in the strategic direction of the business.

Can you please tell us a bit about the Key Accounts function? What do you do and which customers qualify as Key Accounts?

The Key Accounts function exists to work with dotmailer’s largest and most complex clients. These businesses typically operate in many countries. They also have many business units or have quite complex requirements for their email strategy. They are often quite high touch clients and are fairly advanced with their marketing maturity. Many of our clients see us as an extension to their marketing teams. We are often involved with decisions that even go beyond email, which shows the level of trust our clients have in us. We have a very proactive approach to the development of our client’s email programs.

What are your plans for the Key Accounts function?

We have spent the last few years developing a methodology and planning process that has proven to yield results. We are adding new features to the platform all the time. We are also seeing our clients have a more complex technical infrastructure. I want us to continue pushing innovative uses of the dotmailer features and to continue our strong heritage of being able to exceed the expectations of our clients no matter their unique needs.

What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

The main questions I tend to get are around the services that Key Accounts offer – given we work so closely with our Key Account clients, they want to know about the team and the type of service we can provide for them.

Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

Our Key Account approach and methodology is a big differentiator to our clients – as is our transparency. When I show prospective customers our Key Account methodology they always seem so surprised to see it — as if it’s something that other businesses don’t do. I show them sample Account Plans and client roadmaps, as well as the process that we follow to achieve results. I explain that all our suggestions always tie into their business goals and we take into account any internal challenges and barriers. This seems to be a big differentiator and gets them very excited to work with us.

What still surprises you in your daily interactions with dotmailer’s customers – current or prospective?

It never ceases to amaze me how some clients don’t think they are doing anything particularly interesting or unique. If I think that a client is doing something interesting and different, they laugh when I suggest they enter it for an award. Many of our clients seem to think that other organizations are doing it so much better. Digital Marketers really are a humble bunch of people. They definitely need to be recognized for the fantastic work they do. I’m so glad that we have things like the dotmailer ‘dotties’ – our award program designed to do just that.

How much time is your team on the road vs. in the office? Any road warrior tips to share?

On average, the team spend about one day a week on the road, meeting with clients. Luckily, we have this awesome office that our clients love coming to as well and we’re always so glad to have them sit with us.

I love sports. I play basketball and do obstacle course races. I climb, cycle and on occasion snowboard. I also play squash. I play anything that involves kicking, throwing or hitting a ball. I love ice hockey though I don’t play. I am a bit obsessed with the Chicago Blackhawks and the local team the Guildford Flames. I enjoy getting out and about, and do as much as possible around London. Recently, I went to watch Mexican Lucha Wrestling and have been to almost all the Secret Cinema events. My not so guilty pleasure is probably modern ballet. I go at least a few times a year to watch.

I first got to know dotmailer when the company was just a bunch of young enthusiastic web developers called Ellipsis Media back in 1999. I was introduced by one of my suppliers and we decided to bring them on board to build a recruitment website for one of our clients. That client was Amnesty International and the job role was Secretary General. Not bad for a Croydon company whose biggest client before that was Scobles the plumber’s merchants. So, I was probably dotmailer’s first ever corporate client! After that, I used dotmailer at each company I worked for and then one day they approached a colleague and me and asked us if we wanted to work for them. That was 2013. We grabbed the opportunity with both hands and haven’t looked back since.

Tell us a bit about your role

I’m the Global Head of Technical Solutions which actually gives me responsibility for 2 teams. First, Custom Technical Solutions (CTS), who build bespoke applications and tools for customers that allow them to integrate more closely with dotmailer and make life easier. Second, Technical Pre-sales, which spans our 3 territories (EMEA, US and APAC) and works with prospective and existing clients to figure out the best solution and fit within dotmailer.

What accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I would say so far it has to be helping to turn the CTS team from just 2 people into a group of 7 highly skilled and dedicated men and women who have become an intrinsic and valued part of the dotmailer organization. Also I really enjoy being part of the Senior Technical Management team. Here we have the ability to influence the direction and structure of the platform on a daily basis.

Meet Darryl Clark – the cheese and peanut butter sandwich lover

Can you speak a bit about your background and that of your team? What experience and expertise is required to join this team?

My background is quite diverse from a stint in the Army, through design college, web development, business analysis to heading up my current teams. I would say the most valuable skill that I have is being highly analytical. I love nothing more than listening to a client’s requirements and digging deep to work out how we can answer these if not exceed them.

As a team, we love nothing more than brainstorming our ideas. Every member has a valid input and we listen. Everyone has the opportunity to influence what we do and our motto is “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”

To work in my teams you have to be analytical but open minded to the fact that other people may have a better answer than you. Embrace other people’s input and use it to give our clients the best possible solution. We are hugely detail conscious, but have to be acutely aware that we need to tailor what we say to our audience so being able to talk to anyone at any level is hugely valuable.

How much of the dotmailer platform is easily customizable and when does it cross over into something that requires your team’s expertise? How much time is spent on these custom solutions one-time or ongoing?

I’ll let you in on a little secret here. We don’t actually do anything that our customers can’t do with dotmailer given the right knowledge and resources. This is because we build all of our solutions using the dotmailer public API. The API has hundreds of methods in both SOAP and REST versions, which allows you to do a huge amount with the dotmailer platform. We do have a vast amount of experience and knowledge in the team so we may well be able to build a solution quicker than our customers. We are more than happy to help them and their development teams build a solution using us on a consultancy basis to lessen the steepness of the learning curve.

Our aim when building a solution for a customer is that it runs silently in the background and does what it should without any fuss.

What are your plans for the Custom Tech Solutions team going forward?

The great thing about Custom Technical Solutions is you never know what is around the corner as our customers have very diverse needs. What we are concentrating on at the moment is refining our processes to ensure that they are as streamlined as possible and allow us to give as much information to the customer as we can. We are also always looking at the technology and coding approaches that we use to make sure that we build the most innovative and robust solutions.

We are also looking at our external marketing and sharing our knowledge through blogs so keep an eye on the website for our insights.

What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

Most questions seem to revolve around reassurance such as “Have you done this before?”, “How safe is my data?”, “What about security?”, “Can you talk to my developers?”, “Do I need to do anything?”. In most instances, we are the ones asking the questions as we need to find out information as soon as possible so that we can analyse it to ensure that we have the right detail to provide the right solution.

Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

We talk a lot about working with best of breed so for example a customer can use our Channel Extensions in automation programs to fire out an SMS to a contact using their existing provider. We don’t force customers down one route, we like to let them decide for themselves.

Also, I really like to emphasize the fact that there is always more than one way to do something within the dotmailer platform. This means we can usually find a way to do something that works for a client within the platform. If not, then we call in CTS to work out if there is a way that we can build something that will — whether this is automating uploads for a small client or mass sending from thousands of child accounts for an enterprise level one.

What do you see as the future of marketing automation technology? Will one size ever fit all? Or more customization going forward?

The 64 million dollar question. One size will never fit all. Companies and their systems are too organic for that. There isn’t one car that suits every driver or one racquet that suits every sport. Working with a top drawer partner network and building our system to be as open as possible from an integration perspective means that our customers can make dotmailer mold to their business and not the other way round…and adding to that the fact that we are building lots of features in the platform that will blow your socks off.

I’m a dyed in the wool Gooner (aka Arsenal Football Club fan) thanks to my Grandfather leading me down the right path as a child. If you are still reading this after that bombshell, then food-wise I pretty much like everything apart from coriander which as far as I’m concerned is the Devils own spawn. I don’t really have a favorite band, but am partial to a bit of Level 42 and Kings of Leon and you will also find me listening to 90s drum and bass and proper old school hip hop. My favorite holiday destination is any decent villa that I can relax in and spend time with my family and I went to Paris recently and loved that. Guilty pleasure – well that probably has to be confessing to liking Coldplay or the fact that my favorite sandwich is peanut butter, cheese and salad cream. Go on try it, you’ll love it.

The top three reasons were People, Product and Opportunity. I met the people who make up our business and heard their stories from the past 18 years, learned about the platform and market leading status they had built in the UK, and saw that I could add value with my U.S. high growth business experience. I’ve been working with marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners for years across a series of different roles, and saw that I could apply what I’d learned from that and the start-up space to dotmailer’s U.S. operation. dotmailer has had clients in the U.S. for 12 years and we’re positioned to grow the user base of our powerful and easy-to-use platform significantly. I knew I could make a difference here, and what closed the deal for me was the people. Every single person I’ve met is deeply committed to the business, to the success of our customers and to making our solution simple and efficient. We’re a great group of passionate people and I’m proud to have joined the dotfamily.

Dan Morris, dotmailer’s EVP for North America in the new NYC office

Tell us a bit about your new role

dotmailer has been in business and in this space for more than 18 years. We were a web agency, then a Systems Integrator, and we got into the email business that way, ultimately building the dotmailer platform thousands of people use daily. This means we know this space better than anyone and we have the perfect solutions to align closely with our customers and the solutions flexible enough to grow with them. My role is to take all that experience and the platform and grow our U.S. presence. My early focus has been on identifying the right team to execute our growth plans. We want to be the market leader in the U.S. in the next three years – just like we’ve done in the UK – so getting the right people in the right spots was critical. We quickly assessed the skills of the U.S. team and made changes that were necessary in order to provide the right focus on customer success. Next, we set out to completely rebuild dotmailer’s commercial approach in the U.S. We simplified our offers to three bundles, so that pricing and what’s included in those bundles is transparent to our customers. We’ve heard great things about this already from clients and partners. We’re also increasing our resources on customer success and support. We’re intensely focused on ease of on-boarding, ease of use and speed of use. We consistently hear how easy and smooth a process it is to use dotmailer’s tools. That’s key for us – when you buy a dotmailer solution, we want to onboard you quickly and make sure you have all of your questions answered right away so that you can move right into using it. Customers are raving about this, so we know it’s working well.

What early accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I’ve been at dotmailer for eight months now and I’m really proud of all we’ve accomplished together. We spent a lot of time assessing where we needed to restructure and where we needed to invest. We made the changes we needed, invested in our partner program, localized tech support, customer on-boarding and added customer success team members. We have the right people in the right roles and it’s making a difference. We have a commercial approach that is clear with the complete transparency that we wanted to provide our customers. We’ve got a more customer-focused approach and we’re on-boarding customers quickly so they’re up and running faster. We have happier customers than ever before and that’s the key to everything we do.

You’ve moved the U.S. team to a new office. Can you tell us why and a bit about the new space?

I thought it was very important to create a NY office space that was tied to branding and other offices around the world, and also had its own NY energy and culture for our team here – to foster collaboration and to have some fun. It was also important for us that we had a flexible space where we could welcome customers, partners and resellers, and also hold classes and dotUniversity training sessions. I’m really grateful to the team who worked on the space because it really reflects our team and what we care about. At any given time, you’ll see a training session happening, the team collaborating, a customer dropping in to ask a few questions or a partner dropping in to work from here. We love our new, NYC space.

What did you learn from your days in the start-up space that you’re applying at dotmailer?

The start-up space is a great place to learn. You have to know where every dollar is going and coming from, so every choice you make needs to be backed up with a business case for that investment. You try lots of different things to see if they’ll work and you’re ready to turn those tactics up or down quickly based on an assessment of the results. You also learn things don’t have to stay the way they are, and can change if you make them change. You always listen and learn – to customers, partners, industry veterans, advisors, etc. to better understand what’s working and not working. dotmailer has been in business for 18 years now, and so there are so many great contributors across the business who know how things have worked and yet are always keen to keep improving. I am constantly in listening and learning mode so that I can understand all of the unique perspectives our team brings and what we need to act on.

What are your plans for the U.S. and the sales function there?

On our path to being the market leader in the U.S., I’m focused on three things going forward: 1 – I want our customers to be truly happy. It’s already a big focus in the dotmailer organization – and we’re working hard to understand their challenges and goals so we can take product and service to the next level. 2 – Creating an even more robust program around partners, resellers and further building out our channel partners to continuously improve sales and customer service programs. We recently launched a certification program to ensure partners have all the training and resources they need to support our mutual customers. 3 – We have an aggressive growth plan for the U.S. and I’m very focused on making sure our team is well trained, and that we remain thoughtful and measured as we take the steps to grow. We want to always keep an eye on what we’re known for – tools that are powerful and simple to use – and make sure everything else we offer remains accessible and valuable as we execute our growth plans.

What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

The questions we usually get are around price, service level and flexibility. How much does dotmailer cost? How well are you going to look after my business? How will you integrate into my existing stack and then my plans for future growth? We now have three transparent bundle options with specifics around what’s included published right on our website. We have introduced a customer success team that’s focused only on taking great care of our customers and we’re hearing stories every day that tells me this is working. And we have all of the tools to support our customers as they grow and to also integrate into their existing stacks – often integrating so well that you can use dotmailer from within Magento, Salesforce or Dynamics, for example.

Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

In addition to the ones above – ease of use, speed of use and the ability to scale with you. With dotmailer’s tiered program, you can start with a lighter level of functionality and grow into more advanced functionality as you need it. The platform itself is so easy to use that most marketers are able to build campaigns in minutes that would have taken hours on other platforms. Our customer success team is also with you all the way if ever you want or need help. We’ve built a very powerful platform and we have a fantastic team to help you with personalized service as an extended part of your team and we’re ready to grow with you.

How much time is your team on the road vs. in the office? Any road warrior tips to share?

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, one year I attended 22 tradeshows! Top tip when flying is to be willing to give up your seat for families or groups once you’re at the airport gate, as you’ll often be rewarded with a better seat for helping the airline make the family or group happy. Win win! Since joining dotmailer, I’m focused on being in office and present for the team and customers as much as possible. I can usually be found in our new, NYC office where I spend a lot of time with our team, in customer meetings, in trainings and other hosted events, sales conversations or marketing meetings. I’m here to help the team, clients and partners to succeed, and will always do my best to say yes! Once our prospective customers see how quickly and efficiently they can execute tasks with dotmailer solutions vs. their existing solutions, it’s a no-brainer for them. I love seeing and hearing their reactions.

I’m originally from Yorkshire in England, and grew up just outside York. I moved to the U.S. about seven years ago to join a very fast growing startup, we took it from 5 to well over 300 people which was a fantastic experience. I moved to NYC almost two years ago, and I love exploring this great city. There’s so much to see and do. Outside of dotmailer, my passion is cars, and I also enjoy skeet shooting, almost all types of music, and I love to travel – my goal is to get to India, Thailand, Australia and Japan in the near future.

While the program is recently revamped, dotmailer has enjoyed a 17-year history of working side-by-side with partners like Magento, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. We value these relationships as an opportunity to help deliver the best marketing strategies that lead to more business for you and your clients. Our new partnership program extends these relationships with the right tools, resources and benefits to help you build, run and grow a profitable agency, marketing or technology reseller business.

Here are the top five questions about the partner program answered:

Who is the partner program for?

Our partner program delivers two types of certification for two distinct types of audiences:

Partners: For example, a marketing agency that serves both B2B and B2C clients that integrates, develops, and executes email and marketing campaigns on behalf of their clients. Partners will work closely with dotmailer to sell and grow their client base with a tool that directly impacts client retention.

Referrers: For example, a shop that wants to refer leads directly to the dotmailer team. A referrer doesn’t handle the sale or management of the account, but still collects commission when a referral signs up for dotmailer.

What are the benefits of becoming a dotmailer partner?

dotmailer is a fast, powerful, and easy-to-use marketing automation platform with email at its core. Our world-class integrations make dotmailer extensible, and suitable for both B2C and B2B marketers alike. Here’s what some of our current partners have to say:

“We have found that dotmailer offers a strong solution. Not only do they cater to retail brands, but they also have a distinct B2B focus, which aligns with the more than 60% of our clients that have a B2B component as part of their ecommerce channels. Leveraging the dotmailer solution makes these conversations more relevant when discussing their marketing needs. As Magento’s Premier email marketing automation provider, they have invested heavily in both the technology and the sales enablement tools we need to win over customers.” – Caleb Bryant, Strategic Alliances Manager at Gorilla Group

“dotmailer enhances and extends our opportunity to bring customers a solution that provides highly personalized, automated and measureable email interactions to their customers to further nurture leads and customer engagement.” “An additional benefit of dotmailer is the pricing flexibility and geographical reach.” – Motti Danino, VP of Operations, Oro Inc.

How much does it cost?

The dotmailer partner program is free to join and benefits are offered in three tiers: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The benefits include commission, guest blogging, partner case studies, co-hosted webinars, event sponsorship and more. Our main aim is help partners become more successful and rise through the ranks as they become more affluent in offering the dotmailer platform and services.

What’s coming next?

dotmailer is committed to ensuring our agency partners have the tools at their disposal to continue them to grow service retainers and effectively sell a best-of-breed email marketing automation platform. Our philosophy has always been to innovate and we still run in bi-weekly development cycles with quarterly releases. We are constantly innovating on both the platform and our integrations, meaning the partner program will continue to evolve as does the dotmailer feature set.

Every two years, Moz surveys the brightest minds in SEO and search marketing with a comprehensive set of questions meant to gauge the current workings of Google’s search algorithm. This year’s panel of experts possesses a truly unique set of knowledge and perspectives. We’re thankful on behalf of the entire community for their contribution.

In addition to asking the participants about what does and doesn’t work in Google’s ranking algorithm today, one of the most illuminating group of questions asks the panel to predict the future of search – how the features of Google’s algorithm are expected to change over the next 12 months.

Amazingly, almost all of the factors that are expected to increase in influence revolved around user experience, including:

Mobile-friendliness

Perceived value

Readability

…and more

The experts predicted that more traditional ranking signals, such as those around links and URL structures, would largely remain the same, while the more manipulative aspects of SEO, like paid links and anchor text (which is subject to manipulation), would largely decrease in influence.

The survey also asks respondents to weight the importance of various factors within Google’s current ranking algorithm (on a scale of 1-10). Understanding these areas of importance helps to inform webmasters and marketers where to invest time and energy in working to improve the search presence of their websites.

On-page keyword features

These features describe use of the keyword term/phrase in particular parts of the HTML code on the page (title element, H1s, alt attributes, etc).

Titles are still very powerful. Overall, it’s about focus and matching query syntax. If your post is about airplane propellers but you go on a three paragraph rant about gorillas, you’re going to have a problem ranking for airplane propellers.

Keyword usage is vital to making the cut, but we don’t always see it correlate with ranking, because we’re only looking at what already made the cut. The page has to be relevant to appear for a query, IMO, but when it comes to how high the page ranks once it’s relevant, I think keywords have less impact than they once did. So, it’s a necessary but not sufficient condition to ranking.

In my experience, most of problems with organic visibility are related to on-page factors. When I look for an opportunity, I try to check for 2 strong things: presence of keyword in the title and in the main content. Having both can speed up your visibility, especially on long-tail queries.

It’s very easy to link keyword-rich domains with their success in Google’s results for the given keyword. I’m always mindful about other signals that align with domain name which may have contributed to its success. These includes inbound links, mentions, and local citations.

High-quality links still rule rankings. The way a brand can earn links has become more important over the years, whereas link schemes can hurt a site more than ever before. There is a lot of FUD slinging in this respect!

Similar to my thoughts on content, I suspect link-based metrics are going to be used increasingly with a focus on verisimilitude (whether content is actually true or not) and relationships between nodes in Knowledge Graph. Google’s recent issues with things, such as the snippet results for “evolution,” highlight the importance of them only pulling things that are factually correct for featured parts of a SERP. Thus, just counting traditional link metrics won’t cut it anymore.

This is clearly on deck to change very soon with the reintegration of Twitter into Google’s Real-Time Results. It will be interesting to see how this affects the “Breaking News” box and trending topics. Social influencers, quality and quantity of followers, RTs, and favorites will all be a factor. And what’s this?! Hashtags will be important again?! Have mercy!

It’s already noticeable; brands are more prominently displayed in search results for both informational and commercial queries. I’m expecting Google will be paying more attention to brand-related metrics from now on (and certainly more initiatives to encourage site owners to optimize for better entity detection).

Page-level social features

These features relate to third-party metrics from social media sources (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc) for the ranking page.

Highest influence: Engagement with content/URL on social networks, 3.87Lowest influence: Upvotes for the page on social sites, 2.7

Social ranking factors are important in a revamped Query Deserves Freshness algorithm. Essentially, if your content gets a lot of natural tweets, shares, and likes, it will rank prominently for a short period of time, until larger and more authoritative sites catch up.

Social popularity has several factors to consider: (1) Years ago, Google and Bing said they take into account the authority of a social profile sharing a link and the popularity of the link being shared (retweets/reshares), and there was more complexity to social signals that was never revealed even back then. (2) My experience has been that social links and shares have more power for newsy/fresh-type content. For example, a lot of social shares for a dentist’s office website wouldn’t be nearly as powerful (or relevant to consider) as a lot of social shares for an article on a site with a constant flow of fresh content.

Honestly, I do not think that the so-called “social signals” have any direct influence on the Google Algorithm (that does not mean that a correlation doesn’t exist, though). My only doubt is related to Twitter, because of the renewed contract between Google and Twitter itself. That said, as of now I do not consider Twitter to offer any ranking signals, except for very specific niches related to news and “news-able” content, where QDF plays a fundamental role.

By branching mobile search off of Google’s core ranking algorithm, having a “mobile-friendly” website is probably now less important for desktop search rankings. Our clients are seeing an ever-increasing percentage of organic search traffic coming from mobile devices, though (particularly in retail), so this is certainly not an excuse to ignore responsive design – the opposite, in fact. Click-through rate from the SERPs has been an important ranking signal for a long time and continues to be, flagging irrelevant or poor-quality search listings.

I believe many of these will be measured within the ecosystem, rather than absolutely. For example, the effect of bounce rate (or rather, bounce speed) on a site will be relative to the bounce speeds on other pages in similar positions for similar terms.

I want to answer these a certain way because, while I have been told by Google what matters to them, what I see in the SERPs does not back up what Google claims they want. There are a lot of sites out there with horrible UX that rank in the top three. While I believe it’s really important for conversion and to bring customers back, I don’t feel as though Google is all that concerned, based on the sites that rank highly. Additionally, Google practically screams “unique content,” yet sites that more or less steal and republish content from other sites are still ranking highly. What I think should matter to Google doesn’t seem to matter to them, based on the results they give me.

Domain-level link authority features

These features describe link metrics about the domain hosting the page.

Highest influence: Quantity of unique linking domains to the domain, 7.45Lowest influence: Sentiment of the external links pointing to the site, 3.91

Quantity and quality of unique linking domains at the domain level is still among the most significant factors in determining how a domain will perform as a whole in the organic search results, and is among the best SEO “spot checks” for determining if a site will be successful relative to other competitor sites with similar content and selling points.

Throughout this survey, when I say “no direct influence,” this is interchangeable with “no direct positive influence.” For example, I’ve marked exact match domain as low numbers, while their actual influence may be higher – though negatively.

Topical relevancy has, in my opinion, gained much ground as a relevant ranking factor. Although I find it most at play when at page level, I am seeing significant shifts at overall domain relevancy, by long-tail growth or by topically-relevant domains linking to sites. One way I judge such movements is the growth of the long-tail relevant to the subject or ranking, when neither anchor text (exact match or synonyms) nor exact phrase is used in a site’s content, yet it still ranks very highly for long-tail and mid-tail synonyms.

Domain-level keyword-agnostic features

These features relate to the entire root domain, but don’t directly describe link- or keyword-based elements. Instead, they relate to things like the length of the domain name in characters.

Highest influence: Uniqueness of content across the whole site, 7.52Lowest influence: Length of time until domain name expires, 2.45

Character length of domain name is another correlative yet not causative factor, in my opinion. They don’t need to rule these out – it just so happens that longer domain names get clicked on, so they get ruled out quickly.

A few points: Google’s document inception date patents describe how Google might handle freshness and maturity of content for a query. The “trust signal” pages sound like a site quality metric that Google might use to score a page on the basis of site quality. Some white papers from Microsoft on web spam signals identified multiple hyphens in subdomains as evidence of web spam. The length of time until the domain expires was cited as a potential signal in Google’s patent on information retrieval through historic data, and was refuted by Matt Cutts after domain sellers started trying to use that information to sell domain extensions to “help the SEO” of a site.

I think that page speed only becomes a factor when it is significantly slow. I think that having error pages on the site doesn’t matter, unless there are so many that it greatly impacts Google’s ability to crawl.

Mobile will continue to increase, with directly-related factors increasing as well. Structured data will increase, along with more data partners and user segmentation/personalization of SERPs to match query intent, localization, and device-specific need states.

I really think that over the next 12-18 months we are going to see a larger impact of structured data in the SERPs. In fact, we are already seeing this. Google has teams that focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are studying “relationships of interest” and, at the heart of what they are doing, are still looking to provide the most relevant result in the quickest fashion. Things like schema that help “educate” the search engines as to a given topic or entity are only going to become more important as a result.

Finally, we leave you with this infographic created by Kevin Engle which shows the relative weighting of broad areas of Google’s algorithm, according to the experts.

What’s your opinion on the future of search and SEO? Let us know in the comments below.

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Before you start reading, I want to say that I am not an analytics expert per se, but a strategic SEO and digital marketing consultant. On the other hand, in my daily work of auditing and designing holistic digital marketing strategies, I deal a lot with Analytics in order to understand my clients’ gaps and opportunities.

For that reason, what you are going to read isn’t an “ultimate guide,” but instead my personal and practical guide to content and its metrics, filled with links to useful resources that helped me solving the big contents’ metric mystery. I happily expect to see your ideas in the comments.

The difference between content and formats

One of the hardest things to measure is content effectiveness, mostly because there exists great confusion about its changing nature and purpose. One common problem is thinking of “content” and “formats” as synonyms, which leads to frustration and, with the wrong scaling processes present, may also lead to Google disasters.

What is the difference between content and formats?

Content is any message a brand/person delivers to an audience;

Formats are the specific ways a brand/person can deliver that message (e.g. data visualizations, written content, images/photos, video, etc.).

Just to be clear: We engage and eventually share the ideas and emotions that content represents, not its formats. Formats are just the clothing we choose for our content, and keeping the fashion metaphor, some ways of dressing are better than others for making a message more explicit.

Strategy, as in everything in marketing, also plays a very important role when it comes to content.

It is during the strategic phase that we attempt to understand (both thanks to our own site analysis and competitive analysis of others’ sites) if our content is responding to our audience’s interests and needs, and also to understand what metrics we must choose in order to assess its success or failure.

Paraphrasing an old Pirelli commercial tagline: Content without strategy is nothing.

Strategy: Starting with why/how/what

When we are building a content strategy, we should ask ourselves (and our clients and CMOs) these classic questions:

Why does the brand exist?

How does the brand solidify its “why?”

What specific tactics will the brand use for successfully developing the “how?”

Only when we have those answers can we understand the goals of our content, what metrics to consider, and how to calculate them.

Let use an example every Mozzer can understand.

Why does Moz exist?

The answer is in its tagline:

Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz’s software makes it easy.

How does Moz solidify its “why?”

Moz produces a series of tools, which help marketers in auditing, monitoring and taking insightful decisions about their web marketing projects.

Moreover, Moz creates and publishes content, which aims to educate marketers to do their jobs better.

If you notice, we can already pick out a couple of generic goals here:

Leads > subscriptions;

Awareness (that may ultimately drive leads).

What specific tactics does Moz use for successfully achieving its main goals?

Considering the nature of the two main goals we clarified above, we can find content tactics covering all the areas of the so-called content matrix.

Some classic content matrix models are the ones developed by Distilled (in the image above) and Smart Insights and First 10, but it is a good idea to develop your own based on the insights you may have about your specific industry niche.

The things Moz does are many, so I am presenting an incomplete list here.

In the “Purchase” side and with conversion and persuasion as end goals:

Home page and “Products” section of Moz.com (we can define them as “organic landing pages”);

Content about tools

Free tools;

Pro tools (which are substantially free for a 30-day trial period).

CPC landing pages;

Price page with testimonials;

“About” section;

Events sponsorship.

In the “Awareness” side and with educational and entertainment (or pure engagement) purposes:

The blogs (both the main blog and UGC);

The “Learn and Connect” section, which includes the Q&A;

Guides;

Games (The SEO Expert Quiz can surely be considered a game);

Webinars;

Social media publishing;

Email marketing

Live events (MozCon and LocalUp, but also the events where Moz Staff is present with one or more speakers).

Once we have the content inventory of our web site, we can relatively easily identify the specific goals for the different pieces of content, and of the single type of content we own and will create.

I will usually not consider content like tools, sponsorship, or live events, because even though content surely plays a role in their goals’ achievement, there are also other factors like user satisfaction and serendipity involved which are not directly related to content itself or cannot be easily measured.

Measuring landing/conversion pages’ content

This may be the easier kind of content to measure, because it is deeply related to the more general measures of leads and conversions, and it is also strongly related to everything CRO.

We can measure the effectiveness of our landing/conversion pages’ content easily with Google Analytics, especially if we remember to implement content grouping (here’s the official Google guide) and follow the suggestions Jeff Sauer offered in this post on Moz.

On the other hand, we should always remember that the default conversion rate metric should not be taken as the only metric to incorporate into decision-making; the same is true when it comes to content performance and optimization. In fact, as Dan Barker said once, the better we segment our analysis the better we can understand the performance of our money pages, give a better meaning to the conversion rate value and, therefore, correct and improve our sales and leads.

Good examples of segmentation are:

Conversions per returning visitor vs new visitor;

Conversions per type of visitor based on demographic data;

Conversions per channel/device.

These segmented metrics are fundamental for developing A/B tests with our content.

Here are some examples of A/B tests for landing/conversion pages’ content:

Title tags and meta description A/B tests (yes, title tags and meta descriptions are content too, and they have a fundamental role in CTR and “first impressions”);

Prominent presence of testimonials vs. a more discreet one;

Tone of voice used in the product description (copywriting experiment);

Product slideshow vs. video.

Here are a few additional sources about CRO and content, surely better than me for inspiring you in this specific field:

Measuring on-site “editorial” content

Here is where things start getting a little more complicated.

Blog posts, guides, white papers, and similar content usually do not have a conversion/lead nature, at leastnot directly. Usually their goals are more intangible ones, such as creating awareness, likability, trust, and authority.

In other cases, then, this kind of content also serves the objective of creating and maintaining an active community, as it does in the case of Moz. I tend to consider this a subset, though, because in many niches creating a community is not a top priority. Or, even if it is, it does not offer a reliable flux of “signals” so as to appropriately measure the effectiveness of our content because of pure lack of statistical evidence.

A good starting place is measuring the so-called consumption metrics.

Again, the ideal is to implement content grouping in Google Analytics (see the video above), because that way we can segment every different kind of editorial content.

For instance, if we have a blog, not only we can create a group for it, but we can also create

This are just three examples; think about your own measuring needs and the nature of your content, and you will come out with other ideas for content groupings.

The following are basic metrics that you’ll need to consider when measuring your editorial content:

Pageviews / Unique Pageviews

Pages / Session

Time on Page

The ideal is to analyze these metrics at least with these secondary levels:

Medium / Sources, so you can understand what channel contributed the most to your content visibility. Remember, though, that dark search/social is a reality that can screw up your metrics (check out Marshall Simmonds’ deck from MozCon 2015);

User Type, so to see what percent of the Pageviews is due to returning visitors (a good indicator of the level of trust and authority our content has) and new ones (which indicates the ability our content has to attract new potentially long-lasting readers);

Mobile, which is useful in understanding the environments in which our users mostly interact with our content, and how we have to optimize its experience depending on the device used, hence helping making our content more memorable.

You surely can have fun also analyzing your content’s performance by segmenting them per demographic indicators. For instance, it may be interesting to see what affinity categories of your readers there are, depending on the categorization used in your blog and that you have replicated in your content grouping. This, in fact, can help us in better understanding the personas composing our audience, and so refining the targeting of our content.

As you can see, I did not mention bounce rate as a metric to consider, and there is a reason for that: Bounce rate is tricky, and its misinterpretation can lead to bad decisions.

Instead of bounce rate, when it comes to editorial content (and blog posts in particular), I prefer to consider scroll completion, a metric we can retrieve using Tag Manager (see this post by Optimize Smart).

Finally, especially if you also grouped content for outstanding format used (video, embedded SlideShare, etc.), you will need to retrieve users’ interactions through Tag Manager. However, if you really want to dig into the analysis of how that content is consumed by users, you will need to export your Analytics data and then combine it with data from external sources, like YouTube Analytics, SlideShare Analytics, etc.

The more we share, the more we have. This is also true in Marketing.

Consumption metrics, though, are not enough in order to understand the performance of your content, especially if you strongly rely on a community and one of the content objectives is creating and growing a community around your brand.

I usually add comments into these Metrics, because of the social nature comments have. Again, thanks to Tag Manager, you can easily tag when someone clicks on the “add comment” button.

A final metric we should always consider is the page value. As Google itself explains in that Help Page:

Page value is a measure of influence. It’s a single number that can help you better understand which pages on your site drive conversions and revenue. Pages with a high Page Value are more influential than pages with a low Page Value [Page Value is also shown for groups of content].

The combined analysis of consumption and social metrics can offer us a very granular understanding of how our content is performing, therefore how to optimize our strategy and/or how to start conducting A/B tests.

On the other hand, such a granular vision is not the ideal for reporting, especially if we have to report to a board of directors and not to our in-house or in-agency counterpart.

In that case being able to resume all these metrics (or the most relevant ones) in just one metric is very useful.

How to do it? My suggestion is to follow (and adapt to your own needs) the methodology used by the Moz editorial team and described in this post by Trevor Klein.

What about the ROI of editorial content? Don’t give up; I’ll talk about it below.

Measuring the ROI of content marketing and content-based link building campaigns

Theoretically measuring the ROI of something is relatively easy:

(Return – Investment) / Investment = ROI.

However the difficulty is not in that formula itself, but in the values used in that formula.

How to calculate the investment value?

Usually we have a given budget assigned for our content marketing and/or content-based campaigns. If that is the case, perfect! We have a figure to use for the investment value.

A complete different situation is when we must present a budget proposal and/or assign part of the budget to each campaign in a balanced and considered way.

In this post by Caroline Gilbert for Siege Media you can find great suggestions about how to calculate a content marketing budget, but I would like to present mine, too, which is based on competitive analysis.

Here’s what I do:

Identify the distinct competitors which created content related to what we will target with our campaign. I rely on both SERP analysis (i.e.: using the Keyword Difficulty Tool by Moz) and information we can retrieve with a “keyword search” on Buzzsumo.

Social shares per kind of social network (these are available from BuzzSumo). Remember that some of these social shares can be tallied by sponsored content (check this Social Media Explorer post about how to do Facebook competitive analysis).

Consider the delta between what the client/company invested in content marketing (or link building, if it is moving from classic old link building to modern link earning) before, as well as the median investment value of the competitors.

Calculate and propose the content marketing / content-based campaign’s value in a range which goes from “minimum viable budget” to “ideal.”

Reality teaches us that the proposed investment is not the same than the real investment, but at least we then have some data for proposing it and not just a gut feeling. However, we must be prepared to work with budgets that are more on the “minimum viable” side than on the ideal one.

How to calculate revenue?

You can find a good number of ROI calculators, but I particularly like the Fractl one, because it is very easy to understand and use.

Their general philosophy is to calculate ROI in terms of how much traffic, links, and social shares the content itself has generated organically, hence how much it helped saving in paid promotion.

If you look at it, it reminds the methodology I described above (points 1 to 7).

However, when it comes to social shares, you should avoid the classic mistake of considering only the social shares directly generated by the page your content has been published.

For instance, let’s take the Idioms of the World campaigns Verve Search did for HotelClub.com and which won the European Search Awards.

If we we look only at its own social share metrics, we will have just a partial picture:

Instead, if we see what are the social shares metrics of the pages that linked and talked about it, we will have the complete picture.

As you can imagine, you can calculate the ROI of your editorial content using the same methodology.

Obviously the Fractl ROI calculator is far from being perfect, as it does not consider the offline repercussion a content campaign may have (the Idioms of the World campaign was organically published in a outstanding placement on The Guardian’s paper version, for instance), but it is a solid base for crafting your own ROI calculation.

Conclusions

So, we have arrived at the end of this personal guide about content and its metrics.

Remember these important things:

Don’t be data driven, be data informed;

Think strategically, act tactically;

Content’s metrics vary depending on the goals of content itself.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!